Boler Expedition 2009: St Malo

14/08/2013 By Kabutroid
This cache. This cache put up a fight, let me tell you. My wife and I were on vacation for this one, and had decided to put up camp at St. Malo for a change. I mean, it's close to the city (comparatively), it's a pretty small park, so I was kinda iffy at first. Don't get me wrong, I love hitting up the beach here, but I wasn't sure if St. Malo could hold up to the Big Whiteshell region or wherever. Man, was I ever proven wrong. I'm pretty sure that of every camping trip I'd done growing up, this one in particular may have been the best one to date... or at least the best one in even vaguely recent history. No bugs, gorgeous weather, sunny skies, and the Perseids meteor shower. Ok, so all of that is completely separate from the park itself, but nonetheless, it's great out there ToungeOut .

So during this awesome vacation, naturally I needed to make geocaching a part of it. A few days ago I'd tackled the cache nearest our tent, and today I was planning on tackling the East side. Or at least the Northeast side. After a very relaxing and fun walk down from the path from the last cache, we found that the direction to the coordinates finally separated from the path itself. My wife wasn't exactly raring to go tromping through the bushes and trees and mud off-trail, so she opted instead to head down the road and back to the car to wait for me. I instead headed into the wilds towards ground zero.

I quickly found my way out of the wilds, and unexpectedly onto... some other place? I'm not sure if this is a pseudo-campground just off the provincial park (or at least my GPS thought it wasn't on provincial park property), or just houses, but I felt a bit awkward being across the road from a house. Some dogs on their porch started barking at me, but having spent the first 23 someodd years of my life living in the country not too dissimilar from this, it almost felt a bit like I was home. Thus, not caring much about the dogs and feeling a bit more natural in the surroundings, I soon found my way in the general vicinity of ground zero.

And that's... that's when the cache decided not to play nice. At first the GPS led me to a spot that seemed to be just screaming for a cache, but scouring all possible aspects of it led me to nothing. Feeling a bit as though the cache may be missing, I figured it would be foolish not to spread my search area out before I quit. However, given the absolutely vast number of places a cache could be hiding out here, I figured this may be a bit futile. But try I did, and attempted to circle around and hunt through every spot I figured a cache of this size might hide. Alas, after 10 minutes of fruitless searching, I began to feel as though I wasn't going to pull a find on this one. Which kinda disappointed me, since I felt a sorta kinship with the area, and was hoping to tag the find for that reason.

I decided to take one last quick hunt around again before throwing in the towel, but it was more of a vague last-ditch attempt to see if something somehow jumped out at me magically.

And whaddya know... it worked. I can honestly say that I didn't expect to walk away from this with a smiley face, but I'm not gonna argue. The cache in hand, I quickly poked through the contents, and proceeded to sign the logbook. One chainmail ball signature item later, and the cache was placed back as found.

Stepping out of the trees, I took another look around at the area. The dogs had quited down, and the atmosphere of the area just reminded me so much of childhood. Ahhh, memories. If I'm feeling all nostalgic, I should come back here sometime or another if I don't want to drive 4 hours out of the city to see the old house.

So yeah, thanks for the memories and the cache. It was a nice trip back 20 someodd years.

Took: Nothing
Left: Logbook entry and chainmail ball